Hello explorers! So, cool story: did you know The Morale Booster update (aka v1.3.1.0) is out right now?

We're back with another milestone update for Halcyon 6 that includes a brand new Crew Morale mechanic! Affected by your decisions in quests, events, and diplomatic actions, Crew Morale levels provides bonuses - or incurs penalties - as you explore.

Onto the details... and there are a lot! This is a big one, folks.

What's New + Important Changes- New Crew Morale mechanic, receive bonuses (or penalties) depending on current crew's morale. Morale naturally decreases over time but is also increased or decreased based on your actions in events, quests, and diplomatic interactions.- More (20+) random events affecting Morale and even more random travelling events!- Suddenly, greenshirts don't feel quite so 'disposable'...- New Grand Admiral difficulty level!- Even though they are totally awesome and our animator spent weeks and weeks on them, you can now turn off combat animations in the Options menu

In efforts to reduce some of the grind and give players more choice as to how the game progresses, we've made some changes:- greatly reduced the officer XP requirements for later levels- reduced the resource costs for higher tier Ship Hangar Tech research- doubled officer XP gains for most starbase activities

***The next two posts are spoiler-y... ***

- The Chruul Lts arrive a bit earlier and can also be taunted to arrive immediately via the Chruul Lab- The Chruul Mothership now only appears after you combine all 4 Precursor Artifacts in the Chruul Lab to summon her

Bug Fixes + Enhancements- You can now build all equipment in the Foundry, after you've discovered it (with the exception of organic Chruul equipment)- Increased the chances of getting equipment other than Omega Drones- Original launch difficulty preferences have been restored- Fixed a bug where the ordering of activities in starbase rooms would get shuffled around- Slightly increased the enemy ship damage across all difficulty levels, to counter the advantages gained from morale bonuses and ship equipment- Resource generation tasks (Materials, Dark Matter, Crew) now automatically repeat until you decide to cancel- Events that give drone rewards no longer trigger until the drone room is built- Added equipment slots to Act3 alien gift ships- Fixed issue with When In Xlar activity (officers can now be assigned to it)- Added a block to officer power distribution to prevent issue where they'd occasionally be added twice- Fixed a bug where the Mothership Hull Leech attack effects were reversed"

Animation + UI- Improved UI for Ship Equipment screen (including stacking of equipment and a Scrap All option)- Scrapping ships will now return slotted equipment back into the equipment inventory- Cost of emergency station repairs in the Repair Bay have been slightly reduced- Fixed bug with red alert turning off when it shouldn't- You can no longer 'research' ship upgrades via Tech Research- Fixed bug with Cadet Aiming Training 3 not appearing- Fixed bug with invisible pirate ships- Fixed bug with mis-classed Xlar tactical ships- Fixed a bug where new travel events may not trigger for new games- Pirate raids no longer fire in Act 2 if the pirates were wiped out in Act 1- Removed duplicate Willa from Willa's Wraithers fight- Added expiration timers to pirate away missions- Fixed buff being applied to the wrong army in Marauder fight- Fixed typo in Xlar culinary mission- Fixed typo in New Terran Asteroid description- When you have 2 fleets in a sector enter combat, the stronger of the two fleets will enter combat first- Overkill text has been moved to the left to be more visible- Fixed bug where long save file names would make the UI jump around- After assigning an officer to a resource multiplier activitiy, you will no longer receive a pop-up for completion. Instead, you will receive a notification and the officer will continue the task until you decide to cancel it- When selecting an officer for an activity, all officers at the location (including officers already in a task) will appear on the available officers list. This will allow you to easily switch the officer activity without having to cancel their activity first